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Federal district civil cases and courts of appeals · State courts excluded
Year ended 30 September 2025
Published annual figures, not live counts. Appeals exclude the Federal Circuit. These measures are not an all-courts pending total.
43 articles · Newest first
The Illusion of Independent Pricing is Dead For years, corporate defendants have operated under a comforting, if naive, assumption: if a machine sets the price, the humans cannot be guilty of price-fixing. On July 29, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals ...
The Originalist Trap in Federal Firearms Prosecutions For the past four years, federal prosecutors and defense attorneys have been locked in a bizarre historical scavenger hunt, forced by the Supreme Court to scour 18th-century colonial statutes to d...
A Seismic Shift in Delaware M&A Fiduciary Duties For exactly forty years, the gravitational pull of Delaware corporate law has relentlessly drawn change-of-control transactions toward a single, inescapable mandate: get the highest price for the share...
The Executive Gambit That Failed In a blockbuster end-of-term ruling on June 30, the Supreme Court firmly rejected President Trump’s executive directive aimed at restricting birthright citizenship. By striking down the administration's attempt to uni...
The Honeymoon Phase for Generative AI in Litigation is Officially Over For the past three years, civil litigators have treated generative artificial intelligence like a hyperactive, occasionally brilliant junior associate who works for free. But the ...
The End of the Federal Backstop For criminal defense attorneys navigating the bleak landscape of post-conviction relief, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) has long been the monster under the bed. On June 22, 2026, the ...
The Existential Threat to the Shareholder Agreement is Over For the past two years, deal lawyers, private equity sponsors, and venture capitalists have been holding their breath, waiting to see if the contractual architecture underpinning modern corp...
The Administrative State Suffers a Fatal Blow For nearly a century, American administrative law has rested on a fundamental, albeit heavily debated, compromise: Congress could create multi-member regulatory commissions insulated from the President’s ...
The Holy Grail of Global Peace For mass tort defense counsel, the white whale has always been "global peace"—a single, binding resolution that definitively caps corporate liability. But ever since the Supreme Court’s landmark rulings in Amchem Produc...
The Ground-Up Assault on Categorical Bars For nearly two decades, capital defense lawyers have treated the Eighth Amendment’s categorical bar on executing non-homicidal offenders as an unassailable fortress. But fortresses crumble when the foundation...
On June 4, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court slammed the door on one of the white-collar defense bar’s favorite parlor games: trying to strip the Securities and Exchange Commission of its disgorgement powers. By formally upholding the SEC’s authority to d...
The Executive Power Grab Hits a Wall For decades, the executive branch has treated emergency economic statutes as a magic wand to bypass Congress, transforming limited national security tools into sweeping mandates for global trade policy. On Februar...
For the better part of a decade, corporate defense counsel facing consumer labeling class actions have relied on a predictable, reliable playbook to choke out litigation in its infancy: file a motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 1...
The Department of Justice is Facing an Appointments Clause Crisis For federal criminal defense attorneys practicing in the Second, Third, and Ninth Circuits, the most important news of the year didn’t come from a substantive ruling on the elements of...
A Seismic Shift in Capital Markets For the better part of a decade, the Securities and Exchange Commission has wielded the Securities Act of 1933 like a blunt instrument against the digital asset industry. The agency’s posture has been defined by reg...
The Collapse of the Campaign Finance Firewall For decades, election law practitioners have made their living building, maintaining, and defending imaginary walls. The "firewall" between political campaigns and outside spending groups has been the bed...
The Eighth Circuit’s Billion-Dollar August Class action objectors hoping to blow up multi-billion-dollar deals just hit a brick wall in the Midwest. In a stunning eight-day span this August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit delivered ...
The End of the Post-Verdict Ripcord For the criminal defense bar, the federal officer removal statute has always been a powerful, if rarely successful, escape hatch. But can it be used as a post-conviction ripcord? On August 28, 2026, a federal judge...
The Ultimate M&A Indignity: Paying Your Defrauder's Legal Bills For corporate acquirers, there is perhaps no indignity more galling than the Delaware doctrine of advancement. It is a bitter pill to swallow: writing multi-million-dollar checks to fund...
The End of the "Vampire Rule" for Firearms The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has spent the last four years systematically dismantling state-level gun control regimes. But with its latest ruling, the Court has dragged private businesses d...
The End of the "Battle of the Experts" Deferral at Class Certification For years, plaintiffs’ counsel in complex antitrust class actions have relied on a comfortable, albeit flawed, procedural crutch at the class certification stage: presenting a cre...
For the last eight years, federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies have operated in a gray area of digital surveillance, exploiting a massive loophole left open by the Supreme Court. That loophole just slammed shut. On June 29, 2026, the Supr...
Valuation gaps in mergers and acquisitions are routinely bridged by a familiar, often dangerous tool: the earnout. When buyers and sellers cannot agree on what a target is worth, they kick the can down the road, conditioning future payouts on regulat...
A Unanimous End to the Title IX Sports Wars For the last six years, civil rights litigators and state attorneys general have been locked in a bitter, high-stakes tug-of-war over the intersection of transgender rights and federal education law. On Jun...
The Death of the "Global Peace" Strategy For decades, the corporate defense playbook in mass consumer and privacy litigation has been brutally simple, if expensive: fight like hell at the motion to dismiss stage, and if you lose, buy global peace thr...
A Collision of Originalism and the Administrative State The Supreme Court is currently wrestling with a monster of its own creation. On March 2, 2026, a deeply divided Court heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), the ...
The Sacred Cow of Delaware M&A Just Got Slaughtered For nearly forty years, the fundamental commandment of Delaware corporate law during a change of control has been absolute: when a company is up for sale, the board of directors must abandon all oth...
The End of a Fringe Constitutional Theory For years, a vocal subset of legal theorists has argued that the executive branch could unilaterally end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court...
The Defense Bar’s AI Shield Just Cracked For the past few years, corporate defendants facing antitrust class actions over algorithmic pricing software have relied on a comfortable, formalistic defense: We didn’t talk to our competitors; we just bough...
Finality Over Fairness: The First Step Act Gets Gutted For the past few years, federal criminal defense attorneys have effectively used the compassionate release provision of the First Step Act as a vital equitable tool. When Congress declined to mak...
The Delaware Supreme Court Slams the Door on the Governance Panic of 2024 For corporate practitioners, 2026 will go down as the year Delaware forcefully reminded the nation why it remains the undisputed capital of American corporate law. In a rapid-f...
A Seismic Shift in Administrative Law For decades, administrative and regulatory lawyers have advised clients based on a fundamental assumption: independent federal agencies are shielded from direct presidential interference. As of June 29, 2026, tha...
The End of the Smoke-Filled Room For decades, antitrust litigators hunting for Section 1 Sherman Act violations have looked for the proverbial smoke-filled room—emails, recorded calls, or secret meetings where competitors agreed to fix prices. But wh...
The End of Equitable Sentencing Disparities For the past six years, the defense bar has wielded the First Step Act of 2018 as the Swiss Army knife of post-conviction relief. District courts, empowered by the Act's expansion of 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(...
The Pendulum Swings Back to the Boardroom If 2024 and 2025 were the years the Delaware Court of Chancery aggressively policed corporate governance and restricted founder control, 2026 is the year the Delaware Supreme Court firmly hit the brakes. In a...
The Death of the Independent Agency For decades, administrative and corporate lawyers have structured their regulatory strategies around a single, foundational premise: independent agencies are insulated from direct presidential control. On June 29, ...
The Death of the Uniform Federal Class Action If you are a litigator operating under the assumption that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 means the same thing in Chicago as it does in St. Louis, 2026 is delivering a brutal wake-up call. A flurry of...
A Paradigm Shift in Federal Criminal Defense For the past several years, federal criminal defense attorneys have heavily relied on back-end, post-conviction relief to correct draconian sentences. But the Supreme Court’s spring 2026 term has decisivel...
A Clear Message from Dover to Wilmington: Let Them Contract For corporate practitioners, the collective sigh of relief emanating from Wilmington this year is palpable. Throughout 2026, the Delaware Supreme Court has engaged in a systematic, unapologe...
A Structural Earthquake in Constitutional Law The Supreme Court’s June 2026 term has concluded, leaving behind a fundamentally altered constitutional landscape. While mainstream headlines have focused heavily on the Court's rulings regarding the Seco...
The End of the "Sentencing Disparity" Argument for Compassionate Release The Supreme Court has effectively slammed the door on one of the most vital avenues for federal sentencing relief. In a 6–3 decision handed down on May 28, 2026, the Court ruled...
The End of the Chancery Rebellion For corporate practitioners, the message from Dover this year is unambiguous: the Delaware Supreme Court is aggressively course-correcting the Court of Chancery’s recent hostility toward corporate controllers and bes...
The End of an Era for Independent Agencies For nearly a century, the administrative state has rested on a foundational compromise: Congress could create independent multimember agencies, and the President could not fire their leaders without "cause."...
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